Electronic devices require integrated circuits formed as chips or die to perform the many functions for the products with electronic controls or features. As these products include more features or become smaller, the demands for packaging the integrated circuits become increasingly difficult to achieve.
Electronic products can be involved in virtually all aspects of our modern lives. Electronic devices can be embedded in products such as telephones, kitchen appliances, televisions, automobiles, and many other products that require controls, displays, or information storage particularly in small devices or spaces.
The reduction in size of the actual integrated circuits has not improved rapidly enough to keep up with these demands. This has caused larger integrated circuits as well as the need to combine multiple integrated circuits within a single integrated circuit package. The integrated circuits can be arrayed, stacked, or both.
Stacking integrated circuits or modules with integrated circuits require significant spacing for electrical connections to other components within a package or to the base package itself. The increased spacing results in a significantly larger overall package. Stacking also increases the electronic content causing increasing heat.
There have been many attempts to maintain much less reduce size, costs, manufacturing losses, or subsystem failures. In some attempts, connections to a subsystem board cause poor reliability or failures. In other attempts, additional mechanical or chemical cleaning steps are required increasing costs or unusable product.
Virtually all previous attempts have had difficulty with efficient space utilization leaving significant unusable area in or around the package. The previous attempts also typically require more or costly materials as well as more or costly processing methods including systems.
Thus, a need still remains for improving packaging density while maintaining reliability, yield, and manufacturing throughput to improve features, performance and control costs in systems for integrated circuit packages.
In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems.
Additionally, the need to save costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.